WTB SuperMicro X8DTH-6F or iF
- Thread starter scp
- Start date
Notice: Page may contain affiliate links for which we may earn a small commission through services like Amazon Affiliates or Skimlinks.
In case anyone is looking for one of these. There is a place to get these for not too much. There a lots of places moving away from Dell/Compellent CT-040 controllers. I guess they must be nearing EOL. These boxes are an X8DTH-iF, 1x E5540, 3x2GB 10600R, a weird 4GB SSD, a weird Compellent PCIe card all wrapped up in an SC836TQ-R800B chassis(with the direct attach backplane). You can find these for sale on eBay for <$300 and sometimes <$200. If you toss the compellent card and format the SSD, you can install pretty much anything you want on these. I turned one into a FreeNAS box for fun.
Dell Compellent Series 40 San Controller Ct 040 w Trays Dual Power Supplies | eBay and Dell Compellent CT040 San Storage Array RAID Controller E5540 2 53GHz 6GB 16 Bay | eBay Basically all of the things that say Dell or Compellent CT-040 have the same parts. Some might have some extras like SATA or FC cards, but the chasis, motherboard, CPU always seems to stay the same.
Oh interesting, I didn't take away from your previous post to search for the Compellent. Nice find, and, I like the Dell branded bezel lol.
The only qualm I have with the direct attached backplane is you either need a 16 internal port card which are expensive or an expander of which the popular HP expander only runs SATA drives at 3G speeds, or if you don't go with either of those you need another raid controller. Not really a big deal but still annoying.
The only qualm I have with the direct attached backplane is you either need a 16 internal port card which are expensive or an expander of which the popular HP expander only runs SATA drives at 3G speeds, or if you don't go with either of those you need another raid controller. Not really a big deal but still annoying.
I have a couple questions that I cannot find the answers to about these Dell CT-040 units.
First are there any extra Sata or 4 pin molex power connections on the inside? There are 6 Sata ports on the Mobo, so I would assume so, but that could be an expensive mistake.
Second, what is the output from the backplane? In the pics I can find I dont see an obvious output to the Raid card. My plan would be to remove the Dell card and throw in an IBM SERVERAID M1015 ADAPTER .
Third, does anyone know if the backplane supports 5TB sataIII drives?
Thanks for the help!
Ok so the backplane I had in mine was a passive backplane. on the hard drive side it has a SAS/SATA data/power connector(SFF8482) and on the opposite it just has 16 standard single sata ports(not SFF8087, but the 7 pin ports). The power to the back plane is from 4x 4 pin MOLEX connectors. There are 2 more 4 pin molex and 2 more of the smaller 4 pin connectors that used to be used with floppy drives. The backplane has 2x 4 pin power outputs. Both go to SATA power adapters. One is hooked up to the DVD ROM and the other goes to the 4gb SSD.
There is plenty of space to put in an SAS adapter, but you will end up needing either an expander backplane(SC836-EL for example), expander daughter card or 2 M1015s to drive all the drives.
There is plenty of space to put in an SAS adapter, but you will end up needing either an expander backplane(SC836-EL for example), expander daughter card or 2 M1015s to drive all the drives.
It is actually a decent SLC SSD, nothing impressive by today's standards besides the SLC flash.
AP-SAFD25MPA004GS-HT Apacer | Mouser
Be careful, AFAIK you can't build a highly available file server using local storage, even if you create a storage pool on the local server and try to serve it up as "clustered storage". Clustered storage in Server 2012 high availability features has to literally be something like DAS/FC devices that can be shared with multiple servers.
Also, storage spaces is still a bit mediocre right now, you might want to check out ScaleIO or Starwind Virtual SAN.
HOWEVER
Storage Spaces Direct coming in Server 2016 is going to be Microsoft's in box converged technology so I can't wait to try that. That's where you can use multiple nodes all with local storage for failover/redundancy.
Also be sure to check out Dell PERC H310s, they can be flashed to LSI IT mode and are just as good and are usually a bit cheaper.
This is for my home media collection and Citrix XenDesktop lab. I dont really need it to be highly available, just robust enough so that I dont lose data. Downtime is fine as long as my data is intact.
I received my 4 servers today, pretty surprised with the condition. I'm pleased overall however there are some things that annoy me. Not with the chassis themselves but just the seller. They shipped them with bezels but two of the bezels have tabs broken on the sides making them virtually useless. Also, out of the 4 pairs of rails they included, ONE of them isn't even a matching rail lol, it's a short depth rail and the rest are all standard. Amazing how that happens out of 8 rails.
I will see how they react to a request for a replacement rail and bezels and update back.